http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1076843185
RASHMEE Z AHMED
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
LONDON: Hunger strikes against prison conditions, prison detainees held without charge for months and years and innocent asylum-seekers locked up 23 hours a day for committing the crime of seeking political refuge in the developed world. This is the reality of 21st-century Britain, traditionally the last refuge for political dissidents worldwide, according to a screaming newspaper report.
The report, splashed across The Independent on Sunday, comes four days after an estimated 50 asylum-seekers went on hunger strike in Liverpool prison. The newspaper said another jailed asylum-seeker had been on hunger strike since July 5 and was reportedly in a very weak condition in the hospital wing of the prison.
The allegations of inhuman treatment at the hands of British immigration officials and prison staff come within days of saccharine official words of praise for the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Convention, which enshrines the right to seek political refuge.
The British prime minister has been in the forefront of plans to re-write the UN Convention to reflect what he called the "altered reality" of the right to asylum.
Lawyers, politicians and human rights workers have condemned the alleged mistreatment of asylum-seekers, even as the British government comes under fire for instituting "racist" immigration controls at Prague airport to prevent gypsies from entering the UK and applying for asylum.
The report says the asylum-seekers, many of whom are fleeing political persecution in their home countries, are unceremoniously dumped in barred prison cells alongside Britain's most notorious killers.
They are divested of their own clothes and forced to wear prison uniform. It says they are denied access to solicitors and the right to bail. They are allowed just one shower a week, assaulted and verbally abused by other prisoners.
One jailed asylum-seeker says the prison staff deride those who cannot speak English as Kunta Kinte, the name of the African slave in writer Alex Haley's book Roots.
According to government figures, asylum-seekers mainly belong to Iraq, Sri Lanka, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, the former Soviet Union, Turkey, China and Pakistan.
More than 1,000 asylum-seekers are held in jail, says the paper, because there is no room for them in immigration detention centres. The figures are likely almost to double by next year, it says.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1076843185
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